Archive for the 'language' Category
Nightmare 1
In his memoir, Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure, the American post-modern novelist Paul Auster
clarifies his understanding of failure by stating that in his late twenties and early thirties, he went through a period of several years when everything he touched turned to failure .
Temporary relief
As Colin MacCabe noted at a conference titled “The Value of Failure” in June 2005, “success has become one of the key terms by which people evaluate their own and other lives”. When MacCabe refers to failure, he posits it as a crucial component of both the development of knowledge in science and of creative experimentation in the arts. He ends on the question to which degree contemporary society demands success and what happens when, in contemporary Britain (and indeed Europe), both public and private funding for projects in the cultural and educational sectors becomes increasingly success oriented.
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Potentially, ours is “…a world of no-boundaries in which information emerges not from fixed positions but anywhere and everywhere. It is the world of music, myth, total immersion.” For media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, this is what he calls ‘acoustic space’ – a term he uses to talk about the world before the printed word. The era of print, he argues, has been dominated by the visual - an eye-culture - but the electronic and then digital world that has superseded print can, once again, be a culture of the ear.
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What is brand hijacking? For a start, it’s the name of a business-manual type book recently published by Portfolio and written by one Alex Wipperfurth. The kind of big print, bullet-pointed tome that probably began life as a PowerPoint presentation. The book, sub-titled ‘Marketing Without Marketing’, makes admiring comparisons between big name brands and religious cults, which have ‘finely tuned their marketing to hook into nuances of human nature.’ Once the marketers start talking about the nuances, you know that resistance is pretty much futile.
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